Left to right, top to bottom: 1) Nicole Woodard, Bra, Panties, and Socks, Coveralls, and Grid Tank, 2023. Stoneware, stain, 12.5 x 4.5 x 2.5 in. 2) Sun Young Park, Contact (detail), 2023, Ceramic, 43 x 20 x 10 in. 3) Meredith Smith, Every Part (detail), 2023. Ceramic, wire, 60 x 60 x 1 in. 4) Adams Puryear, Untitled, 2023. Stoneware and glaze, 2.5 x 2.2.5 x 6 in. Photo courtesy of the artist. 5) Cindy Leung, To Seek and To Hide, 2023. Resin, porcelain, brick, epoxy, shipping peanuts, and felt, 5 x 6 x 6 in. 6) Gina Pisto, flowerpot VII (detail), 2023. Stoneware, glaze, 54 x 18 x 18 in. Photos courtesy of the artists.
Milestones: belger arts’ TENth Annual Resident ARTIST Exhibition
ON VIEW THROUGH SEPTEMBER 2, 2023
at Belger Crane Yard Studio
2011 Tracy Avenue Kansas City, MO, 64108
The public is invited to meet several resident and visiting artists from 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 from 6 to 8 pm on first Friday, August 4. The exhibition includes work by Cindy Leung, Sun Young Park, Gina Pisto, Adams Puryear, Meredith Smith, and Nicole Woodard.
This year Belger Arts celebrates a significant milestone: the tenth year of its Artists in Residence program. The program originated at Red Star Studios, a long-time Kansas City ceramics gallery and studio. After its closing the program found a permanent home in May 2013 when Belger Crane Yard Studios opened. Belger Crane Yard Studios continues to host national and international artists through the program, providing ceramic artists the opportunity to expand their body of work or create a special project that may be outside of the scope of their routine studio practice.
The group exhibition, with its range of styles, themes, and techniques, also marks a milestone for the six artists, as it is the culmination of their time in the residency program. Through porcelain, a ceramic material originating from the East and popularized by the West, Cindy Leung facilitates conversations around topics such as consumerism, colonization, and cultural hybridity. Sun Young Park combines clay and non-clay materials to create large, abstract sculptures that reflect how she processes and translates her reality and explores the duality of the material and the conceptual. Adams Puryear documents pop and internet culture, combining traditional techniques and contemporary imagery inspired by the internet’s “anti- filter.” Curio as a site within the domestic, plays a major role in Gina Pisto's work that explores the ritual of collecting and preservation as an act of desire. Meredith Smith uses clay, figurative sketching, poetry, and various other aspects of her work to relay an array of experiences across the human condition. Nicole Woodard's work currently focuses on exploring the vulnerability and trauma of the body from the perspective of a woman.
